 Respondents may provide too much information, rather than too little, because they are trying to provide as much useful information as possible, and therefore over-report the frequency of events.Some researchers perceive this over reporting as telescoping because people are including events beyond the given period, but the over reporting could be due to the demand characteristics of the study.Demand characteristics can explain the appearance of forward telescoping, but cannot explain backwards telescoping and can not explain the inaccurate recall of dates when respondents are not led to believe that a certain answer is desirable.